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iPad in Daily Life, Battery Life and Camera Quality

To test the battery on the iPad 2, I set the screen brightness to 70%, disabled auto-brightness and loaded a 720p rip of Inception for continuous playback until the battery expired. The iPad 2 was good for 10 hours and 25 minutes of usage, living up to Apple’s 10-hour claim.

Your mileage will vary depending on how heavily you use iPad 2, but I’ve only had to charge the device twice in the full week that I’ve owned it. This is pretty impressive as I have worked with the tablet every day, sometimes for hours at a time.

Daily usage battery results are right on par with what I experienced with the original iPad as well. The impressive battery life you can get from the iPad plays an utmost important role on the convenience and usability of the tablet form factor.

iPad in Daily Life

When I received my first iPad several months ago, I questioned whether it would be able to integrate into my daily tech life between my iPhone, netbook and desktop PC or if the chatter of it being a "large iPod Touch" were true.

I discovered pretty quickly that there were some valid uses for the iPad. I generally leave the device on my nightstand and spend about an hour with it each night while lying in bed, catching up on the day's activities at my favorite websites. This replaces my iPhone or netbook that I used to use for the same tasks. When I have friends over, they almost always ask to play with the iPad or want to use it to look something up quickly on Google. This past weekend, I entertained seven friends as we watched a UFC event. We had three iPads on hand and I don't think any of them sat unused the entire night.

I don't travel much, so I can't speak of its ability to fully replace a laptop for personal use. I would suspect, however, that it's quite capable of keeping you entertained especially if you have Internet access. The tablet form factor can be convenient at times and the 10+ hours of battery life will best nearly any portable computer.

Although Apple is showing some early steps toward productivity software in iOS, the iPad and every other tablet currently available is mostly marketed for entertainment use. Content creation will definitely get better over time as the software side can be better exploited, but as of today an ultraportable is hands down a better device for productivity.

For that same reason, on the business side, a dedicated notebook is still hard to replace, even if you had a wireless keyboard and some quality productivity apps on your iPad.

iPad 2 Camera Quality

Here are some camera quality shots to give you a hands-on perspective of what we observed when using the iPad 2 in FaceTime, when taking pictures using the rear camera, as well as recording video (the 720p quality video has been uploaded to YouTube).